So after my last article that I hope you all enjoyed I wanted to tell you where I went next in my ‘First Steps as a Planeswalker!’ and share what I experienced next.

Stalling The Enemy

Having started battles against a good friend of mine I quickly began to realise where the base of my Blue deck was leading me. For those of us who are new to Magic I think here is a good point to warn you that playing against a blue deck can be one of the most frustrating things you can experience (as my friend John will attest to). What they are very good at doing is preventing their opponent from doing what they want. Usually by cancelling that creature that you wanted to play or stopping sorcery in its tracks. With cards such as Essence Scatter and Cancel.

These cards are used by waiting for your opponent to exhaust his resources, paying the cost to play a spell, and then in response casting my own spell that prevents the opponents spell from resolving. This leaves them having used their resources up for little to no reward.

I really enjoyed these cards and with the cards I had accumulated I quickly loaded up my deck with cards that worked perfectly at stalling and preventing my opponent’s plans. At this point there were dozens of games played between us. My blue deck went up against a starter Red and also Green deck that had just had some minor adjustments made to them based on a few cards that we had picked up from a few booster packs.

Remember booster packs are a good way to bolster the cards you have and give you new options for your decks! A lot of places familiar with trading card games will do them slightly cheaper the more that you buy. Some do reasonably priced booster boxes if you and a few friends wanted to split one these can be a great way to go. Alternatively there are sites out there that sell single cards and you can pick and choice what you specifically want.

Dealing Damage!

Now at this point I was learning a very important lesson in my beginning steps through Magic the Gathering and I will share this with you. My deck was great at stopping my opponent. Unfortunately, what it then wasn’t doing was anything to actually win the game. Because I was so focused on stopping my opponent’s spells I found that I was not doing damage or contributing enough to other ways of winning. I was able to get some creatures out like Jace’s Mindseeker that I showed you last time but usually this wasn’t enough to win the game for me. What I had done is loaded up on cards like Wall of Frost to delay my opponents creatures. These work well at doing their job but didn’t help me take those crucial 20 points of health off my opponent. Eventually I was finding that I was becoming overwhelmed when I was unable to prevent everything that my opponent was doing as the game went on.

The significant lesson that I had taken away from these games was that I need to incorporate a specific winning mechanic that would work well with the type of cards that I enjoyed and it really brought home to me the idea of a balanced deck. After a little bit of research I thought I had found just that. I was about to dive in to the realms of a ‘milling’ deck. What a deck that ‘mills’ does is aim to attack the opponent’s library (Deck) rather than their health. This is trying to make them run out of cards forcing them to lose the game by not being able to draw any more cards when they are required to.

I knew that I had cards like the Mindseeker that forced my opponent to remove 5 cards from their library so I began looking for other cards that would do the same in the same set that I was playing in. I discovered other cards such as Tome Scour and Traumatize along with a Jace Planeswalker card that I liked the look of.

It’s worth noting here that Planeswalkers play a little differently, rather than play like a creature they can be attacked like a player can, they treat their tokens as health and have to pay the cost in tokens to do their abilities. For example Jace starts with four tokens I can use his top power shown on the picture to take him to five tokens. If he was attacked by a creature with three power and I was unable to block it. Jace would then go down to two tokens. If his tokens are reduced to zero he is removed from play.

The next time I would come to play my regular opponent I would have a few more tricks up my sleeve. Look out for my next article where I will let share if these adjustments to my deck had paid off!

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7 Comments

Glad to someone enjoying MtG. I played for several years, but unfortunately started to take it too seriously and was buying cards by the box load A good site that I used to use was Manaleak. You can get what you want, from boxes to boosters and singles. Plus IIRC there used to be comments against card descriptions etc, so giving you ideas for new mechnics. Looking forward to your next article.

Yeah I am enjoying it, when I was playing the old VS System I was in a similar boat buying cards buy the box rather than the odd bits, now as a player I just tend to buy singles and only boosters occasionally. I have been using Magic Madhouse a bit so will check out Manaleak.

I picked up MTG again with a bunch of friends at around the Innistrad block, with the idea that it would provide an excuse for a bunch of us to get together, drink and play games. We also had the crazy idea that with it being a card game, the footprint of the hobby in our houses / flat would not be that great.

WRT to places to buy stuff from, Magic Madhouse has been mentioned, but I’d also point to sites such as Chaos Cards and Manascrew, the latter of which while seems to be a smaller entity than the others, is a bit more personal, i.e. whenever I’ve ordered single cards from there, they’ve sent a nice personal letter with my cards, and have always sent some free random cards along with the order.

I thought that the best stratergy to win games was to buy more, hehe. Whilst it is a great game and most of the fun for me was building decks, but became a bit disillusioned as I won games against far better players than I because I bought more than them. Dropped the game soon after learning that my cards would be out of date a couple of years after buying them. I hear Living Card Games (LCG) is the natural progression with people moving on from MtG and I hear the Netrunner series is one of the best out there at present.

If you became disillusioned with MtG because you were winning games on the basis you spent more on your decks, then you could have played Sealed / Draft / Cube with friends, or attended events where such formats were taking place.

Cards going out of date is an issue if you want to make it so; if you play with friends, it’s entirely up to your group what rules you want to follow as well (although I’d argue technically, very few cards go “out of date”, they simply shift into different formats).

I’ve played MTG for over 17 years and this is my informed opinion… The most fun I had was during the early days when I would a pre-constructed deck and a few boosters and play on what is the newbie level of MTG. Playing against similar constructed decks gives a feeling of randomization. The least fun I had was when I played in ‘Legacy’, The upper regions of MTG are not only very costly (lands alone set you back 30-100€ a piece) but they seem to involve a almost desperate element. If you spend nearly 800€ on your deck to make it fit for tournaments and you lose against a pre-constructed deck the player in question will be very upset. Note: Some legacy decks are so “dangerous” they end the game by turn 3. So much for a fun game of MTG if the opponents deck ignores your own deck. ‘Modern’ is trying to get some control over the costs of decks by using only recent cards often a full modern deck limits the costs around 60-70€ including good lands. Still not quite the cheapest option.

Drafting is fun if you are willing to spend buckets of money and won’t mind trading away (or selling) your high-priced cards to keep the hobby going. Cube (drafting with your already purchased cards) can be a spot of work since you basically make your own boosterbox and selecting 480 or so cards from an even larger collection takes a while and requires endless testing.

Boosterwars is most likely the easiest and cheapest option if a Cube is not possible. A pair of boosters add a small selection of lands and you are ready to play. No additional fuss just open the packs add lands and game. High fun, limited costs no bought-to-win decks or Internet-lists.

Pauper and Peasant are 2 noteworthy deck construction types. Both use 0 rares! Since rares and mythic rares can be quite expensive and obviously RARE, they form the largest hurdle to overcome and are often KEY to winning (Legacy). You get to use some of the worst cards in MTG and that can be hilarious sometimes.

Not sure why I wrote this post but MTG is fun but expensive if you let it. Check online to get some info on the more obscure deck-construction types. Peasant is one of my favorite types and is easy to pick up if you only just started or have been playing for over a decade. Hope it helps you find your way back to having fun for a limited amount of money.

It’s all about playing in the environment that ensures that you enjoy it. With a beast like MTG it is very easy to get swept up in the ultra competitive aspect and it can become easy to lose sight of the enjoyment. I suppose that is similar in a lot of the larger franchises at the moment though.